Given McLaren's dismal 2015 season and the need to regroup and rekindle its relationship with engine partner Honda, one would have thought that the Woking outfit's winter would have resembled a Siberian blizzard.
According to McLaren racing director Eric Boullier, while there was no shortage of work or pressure under the roof of the McLaren Technology Centre these past months, the team worked serenely to achieve its purpose.
"It has been a busy winter," Boullier acknowledged.
"I heard the story about bringing extra shifts at Christmas time, it was perhaps one of the quietest winters for McLaren, not in terms of workload but in terms of dramas.
"The atmosphere was good, everybody knew what they had to do. It was tense and on the edge, we couldn’t do more I think.
"We have revised our car completely, we have reinforced our corporation with Honda, we travelled back and forth a lot to Japan, so it has been a very successful winter."
On the subject of its current performance level, the Frenchman admits the team's focus is currently centered on reliability, the level of which has increased noticeably, and collecting data.
"Compared with the others, I have no idea, [where we stand] as it is too early and it was not the target of the first two days," explained Boullier.
"We had a lot to fix on the reliability and running [from 2015], and over the winter we had to build a car on engineering brains, software and computers so we have numbers and we need to find out if they correlate.
"So we have spent the first few days seeing if these numbers are correlating because it's important to put them back in the system for the future development of the car."
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